Nevertheless, nothing had prepared Barry Lankester or his four man crew — a cameraman who had been with Eighth Army in North Africa at the time of the Battle of El Alamein, a boyish assistant cameraman with an unruly beatnik haircut, a soundman who had worked for EMI before the October War, and an amiable old BBC stager who performed the combined roles of director, producer and general fixer — for what they had lived through, and somehow survived, in the last two hours.
The crew had been setting up for a routine background, or ‘filler’ piece — just to lend an extra layer of local colour and context to the melange of material they had recorded in the last week — when, out of a half-blue, half-overcast warm Mediterranean spring sky, salvos of huge shells had begun to fall on the island. It had been as if the heavens had suddenly been torn asunder, ripped apart. The air itself had screamed in agony and then belatedly the sound of the first great explosions had tolled like thunder across the previously idyllic sandstone buff and yellow bastions, ramparts and close-packed houses in the cities surrounding the Grand Harbour.
Coincidentally, the crew had found itself in a prime position to witness what followed. The Lower Barraka Gardens commanded an unobstructed view of the Grand Harbour and of all traffic entering and leaving port via the gap in the King George V Breakwaters which protected the anchorage from easterly storms. The ‘gardens’ contained a colonnaded neo-classical temple — a ‘folly’ erected in fairly recent times — and monuments to the person of Alexander Ball, the first British governor of Malta and commemorating the Great Siege of 1565.
Barry Lankester had been delivering a loosely scripted talk to camera as he strolled — very slowly — through the gardens, which were a little overgrown and somewhat unkempt, about the person of Sir Alexander John Ball, when the World went mad.
Notwithstanding, Nelson had described him as a ‘great coxcomb’ on first acquaintance in 1782, Ball was by all accounts a remarkable man. Ball had subsequently confounded his old friend’s opinion of him when in command of HMS Alexander at the Battle of the Nile in 1797, and later achieved the rank of Admiral. Appointed Civil Commissioner of Malta he was sent to the archipelago in 1801 as the Plenipotentiary Minister of His British Majesty for the Order of Saint John to arrange the evacuation British forces in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Amiens, that most ill-found of armistices which book-ended the two great paroxysms of the Napoleonic Wars. When those wars had re-ignited, partly because of the British refusal to hand over the Maltese Archipelago to the ‘Little Corporal’, Ball became the man responsible for first bringing the Maltese islands into the Empire.
‘Napoleon had once said that he would rather see a suburb of Paris under the governance of the British if that was what it took to remove the Royal Navy from the Grand Harbour,’ Barry Lankester had been explaining in what he hoped was his trademark urbane, engaging way. ‘Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1814 as ratified by the Congress of Vienna, Malta and all its dependencies passed to the British. Ball was greatly loved by the Maltese people; he had after all saved the islands from the brutal despotism of Napoleon. Ball’s secretary and assistant from around 1804 was a certain Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man whose poetry would later leave an even more indelible mark in history. Coleridge said of Ball that he was a truly great man…’
That was when the first shells had screamed over the Grand Harbour and rained down on the most strategically vital airbase in the British Commonwealth.
Barry Lankester had swung around to watch the pillars of smoke and fire erupting from the direction of RAF Luqa. He had stared for some seconds in disbelieving shock, until registering the banshee ululating wailing of the air raid warning sirens sweeping across the island he had got a grip.
Thereafter he had kept talking; the soundman had kept on recording and the camera had kept rolling until they exhausted their Kodak 16-millimetre film stock.
Now the five dusty, ragged looking BBC men surveyed the carnage in Valletta and in the cities across the Grand Harbour; the vile stench of burning was in their faces, oily smoke fell into the anchorage like an evil miasma. Distantly, small arms fire rattled; here there, everywhere it seemed because their ears still rang with the concussion of the savage bombardment which had eventually silenced the 3.7-inch calibre guns — no more than peashooters in comparison with the naval rifles of the big ships off shore — of St Elmo’s Fort less than a quarter of a mile away.
Barry Lankester blinked, his eyes full of pulverised grit.
“Please tell me we got that destroyer on film,” he demanded rather than asked.
None of them had quite believed what they were seeing.
The long, grey deadly silhouette of HMS Talavera — festooned with gun barrels, her decks a hive of activity and with a multiplicity of flags running up, and being run up her masts — had raced for the open sea throwing up a seething white bow wake the like of which the Grand Harbour had never before, nor would in all likelihood, ever see again. The ship had seemed so close to them that they could almost have reached down and touched her mastheads at that moment when two thirds of her length had disappeared — completely disappeared— inside a monstrous forest of shell splashes.
They had all held their breath for a moment, and another.
And then the destroyer had rushed out of the maelstrom.
Even from the best part of two hundred yards away Barry Lankester had seen the splinter damage on the Talavera’s bridge, the bodies strewn on her decks, glimpsed the fresh red blood spilling down her flank and splashed across her single elegant funnel.
The image of the blood and the great battle ensign streaming from the ship’s main mast halyards would be etched on his waking thoughts forever…
“I got everything, Barry,” the crew’s balding, greying cameraman said, his taciturn delivery edged around with atypical breathlessness. “The ship, the bombardment, even the parachutists. We’ve got five reels of gold dust. Absolute pure bloody gold dust, mate!”
The man patted his camera.
“The battle out to sea was probably too far away to show much of anything in particular except gun flashes and the lightning,” he went on. “But I got good long steady shots of those Yank destroyers and that bloody battleship blasting away as they headed north. Pure bloody gold dust!”
Barry Lankester turned away and looked out to sea where in the middle distance a great spring squall was tracking across the leagues of ocean where the modern Battle of Malta had just been fought. A battle fought with unremitting, mercilessly savagery like some terrible trial by combat of yore; with no quarter asked or given while all the while the thunder clouds gathered and giant tridents of lightning spiked down into the midst of the fight. He felt like he had just witnessed some kind of Götterdämmerung; a scene straight out of a Wagnerian opera, a dreadful twilight of the gods.